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QUARTERLY 

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Entered at the Post Oflice at Hartford, Ct., as Seco".' r-i-,,. ^nnil taattcr, April, 1894 




LAHME T.AHi), 



SolMcr an5 Servant Series 



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Hrcbbisbop of Canterbury 
anb fll>art^r 



BY 

Lucius Waterman, D. D. 



CHURCH MISSIONS PUBLISHING CO. 

211 State St., Hartford, Conn. 






NOTE 

This Pamphlet was, in its original form, a lecture written about the time of 
the Laud Commemoration (250 years from the Archbishop's death) in Jan- 
uary, 1895. The writer had no opportunity to make use of the valuable 
books and papers which that Commemoration drew out, and can only suggest 
them here. His own sources were more particularly the following: 

Laud's Diary, passim. 

Laud's "Troubles and Trial." 

Mozley, J. B., Essays, "Historical and Theological," L, 106-228. 

Littel's Living Age, CXIII, 1586 (Oct. 31, 1874), Article on Laud. 

Bright. W., "Waymarks of History," 323-354, 426-432. 

Also, that invaluable book — bitter, indeed, but no more bitter than a 
prophet's roll has to be sometimes — Dr. Thomas W. Coit's "Puritanism." 

Macaulay's views on Laud are given in his Reviews of Hallam's "Constitu- 
tional History," and of a "Life of John Hampden." 

To these may well be added now references to Gladstone, W. E., Romanes 
Lecture in Oxford University, Oct. 24, 1892. 
Wakeman, H. O., "The Church and the Puritans," 94-168. 
Hutton, W. H., "William Laud," in "English Leaders of Religion." 
Hutton, W. H., "English Church from Charles I. to Anne," Ch. III.-VH. 
Collins, W. E., edited by, "Archbishop Laud Commemoration Lectures." 

The Lecture has been read before 
The Historical Club, of Laconia, N. H.; 

The Students of the General Theological Seminary, by whom it was pri- 
vately printed, in 1912; 
The Albany Cathedral Summer School, 1912; 
The Cambridge Conference for Church Work, 1914. 



Milliam %mb 

Hrcbbiebop of (tanterburi^ an& flDartijr 



''What is the matter with the present Archbishop of Canter- 
bury?" I said to a young Englishman whom I had encountered 
in an EngHsh inn in 1888. I had referred, I may say, to Arch- 
bishop Benson as holding the same view that I was advocating 
of a certain subject, and I had been met with a rather con- 
temptuous setting aside of my authority. ''Oh! well," said 
my ingenuous young friend of an hour, "there is nothing the 
matter with him particularly, but when a man talks about 
'the martyred Laud,' what can you do with him?" Then I 
took that young man to me, and kindly, but firmly, pointed 
out to him in Socratic fashion by catechetical questioning 
of his somewhat inflexible intelligence, that if either Lord 
Salisbury or Mr. Gladstone should be put to death in a triumph- 
ant uprising of the contrary party, on the ground that his 
political principles, which he had always advocated, were 
injurious to the realm, and because he was such a power- 
ful upholder of them, the statesman so murdered would be 
a martyr, whether his views were right or wrong. When 
he had assented to that commonplace, I felt that I had en- 
larged his historical imagination, and I hoped that I had done 
him good. Surely, whatever we may think of Laud otherwise, 
it is mere beef against brains that refuses him the title of a 
martyr, dying unselfishly for intense convictions, even though 
no one ever went through any useless form of offering him an 
opportunity to recant. And a martyr is apt to be an 
interesting study, even a martyr on the wrong side. "It 
may be," says Canon Mozley, speaking of the interest that 
clings to this very period of history, "it may be that when 
men die for their principles, they are supposed to have some- 
thing to say for themselves." That is what I venture to claim 



6 Soldier and Servant Series 

for William Laud. He has something to say for himself, and 
for two hundred years English History refused flatly and 
uncritically to hear it. The last fifty years have seen a distinct 
change, but no history of England that I have yet seen seems 
to me to reflect the new light with any fulness. 

Before presenting any positive views about Laud, there- 
fore, I want first to set down on the negative side that it is 
unhistorical to call him either a fool or a knave. I trust that 
that will seem to be a moderate statement, but nevertheless 
the thing which I stamp as unhistorical has been said over 
and over. The late Lord Macaulay — I emphasize the word 
"late," for he is a historian more thoroughly defunct than 
Herodotus, — the late Lord Macaulay is *'the infant phenome- 
non" among English historians. He did more reading, perhaps, 
in his boyhood and early manhood, than any other man in 
England, and thus he acquired more knowledge, such as it 
was, and by consequence a more superficial and more crudely 
undigested knowledge, than any other historical writer of 
eminence that England ever had. Unfortunately, he has 
also been the most popular. In the United States his history 
had a circulation surpassing that of any other book in the 
world except the Bible (Encyclopedia Britannica, ''Macaulay") 
His smart sayings have done much to pervert the judgment 
of our great English-speaking family. "His propositions have 
no qualifications," says the Encyclopedia Britannica.* "Un- 
instructed readers like this assurance, as they like a physician 
who has no doubt about their case. But a sense of distrust 
grows upon the more circumspect reader as he follows page 

after page We inevitably think of a saying attributed to 

Lord Melbourne, *I wish I were as cocksure of any one thing 
as Macaulay is of everything.' " 

"Cocksure" of everything, carefully exact about nothing, 
the man who has stood next to the Bible in the love and con- 
fidence of our simple-hearted American readers is easily 
contemptuous here. With him William Laud is "an imbecile," 
"a superstitious driveller," "a ridiculous old bigot." Poor 



* The article "Macaulay" was written by the late Mark Pattison 
(ob. 1884), who may be described as a "universal solvent" in the field of 
criticism. Though a man in Holy Orders, he had not the prejudices of a 
Churchman, nor any prejudice in Javor of anything. 



William Laud, Archbishop 7 

soul! He does not get off with that sort of imputation. The 
same master hand writes him down as a vindictive persecutor, 
* 'irritable," * 'quick to feel for his own dignity, slow to sym- 
pathize with the sufferings of others, and prone to the error, 
common in superstitious men, of mistaking his own peevish 
and malignant moods for emotions of pious zeal." He has 
''a diabolical temper," which is a pretty strong statement. 
Nay, we are told of the Star Chamber and High Commission 
Court, that "Guided chiefly by the violent spirit of the primate 
and freed from the control of Parliament, they displayed a 
violence, a rapacity, a maligmant energy, which had been 
unknown to any former age. The government was able, 
through their instrumentality, to fine, imprison, pillory, 
and mutilate without restraint." (Macaulay's History, p.68- 
69). Of course, this last passage is chiefly talk. Even Mr. 
Macaulay would have acknowledged, if personally pressed, 
that the royal tyranny was harder on Jews in the days of King 
John than on Christian Englishmen in the days of Charles I. 
Even Mr. Macaulay should have felt that the confiscation 
of the wealth of the monasteries by Henry VHI. was more 
violent and more rapacious than any proceeding that was 
dreamed of under any of the Stuarts. No doubt, he liked that 
kind of violence and rapacity, however, and stood ready to 
defend it, but how could he compare the cutting off of Prynne's 
and Leighton's ears, as a matter of "malignant energy," with 
the beheading of Sir Thomas More, or with the death of Laud 
himself? 

As to this malignant energy, it is a simple fact, to be noted 
at the beginning of our discussion, that while the cause of 
absolutism has its three martyrs, Charles and Strafford and 
Laud, the party of resistance to oppression has none. Not 
a man lost his life for his opinions, political or religious, during 
the time when Laud was the chief guide of England's state- 
craft, no, not even in New England, where later, under the 
Commonwealth, they began to hang Quakers, and went on 
until they were frightened out of it by the Restoration of King 
Charles H. Compared with courts of the nineteenth century 
Laudian courts were cruel. The world of his day was a cruel 
world. But compared with Commonwealth courts and Puritan 



8 Soldier and Servant Series 

courts Laudian courts were distinctly less cruel and less op- 
pressive. * 

Another thing I must say right here, * 'Toleration" was not 
yet a recognized doctrine of the opponents against whom 
Laud felt called to contend. I am not saying this to excuse 
Laud for being intolerant. Intolerant in principle he was not.f 
But as an adviser of the King, and as a powerful influence in 
English life, he had to deal with people who were themselves 
intolerant revolutionaries. He saw around him in England 
a growing politico-religious party who meant to crush out in 
England, if they could, what he believed to be the true religion 
of Jesus Christ. The rising Puritan element of that day had 
no idea of allowing an Episcopal Church to exist anywhere, 
if they could help it, nor the Church of England Prayer Book, 
nor any ministry claiming to be a priesthood, nor any such 
forms of worship as the Anglicanism of Laud clung to as most 
spiritual. The Puritan party meant to fight all that sort of 
thing to the death. To tolerate the Puritans with their well- 
known principles was to tolerate (just so far) a conspiracy 
against English liberty. The Puritan party were endeavoring 
to get power that they might destroy the liberty of all men who 
differed from them in opinion. The Westminster Assembly's 
Longer Catechism includes among sins against the Second 
Commandment '* tolerating a false religion." The ''Solemn 
League and Covenant" of the Scottish Puritans pledges them 
to "extirpate popery and prelacy," and forbids the counten- 
ancing any such evils as unfaithfulness to God. Over here in 
New England, Cotton Mather wrote, "It was toleration that 
made the world anti-Christian, and the Church never took 
hurt by the punishment of heretics." President Oakes, of 
Harvard University, preaching an Election Sermon, proclaimed 
aloud, 'T look upon toleration as the first-born of all abomina- 
tions." (T. W. Coit's Puritanism, p. 258-288). 

Again, I must have a word about the methods of these 
people. Opinion in our time is divided as to what ought to 



* Cf. Stoughton's "Ecclesiastical History of England" (Non-Conformist), 
II., 362: "The amount of persecution inflicted upon Quakers by magistrates 
and by mobs during the Commonwealth is almost incredible." 

t Cf. Morley's "Life of Gladstone," III., 480. Mr. Gladstone is the 
speaker: "Do you know whom I find the most tolerant churchman of that 
time? Laud!" 



William Laud, Archbishop 9 

be done to people who utter speeches or write pamphlets 
inciting anarchists to use dynamite. Most of us are not yet 
alarmed with quaking fears that the anarchists will do it. If 
we had such fears, we should demand such penalties for such 
utterances as we thought would stop them. In the reign of 
King Charles I. pamphlets suggesting that somebody ought 
to be killed were seriously apt to be followed by the killing of 
somebody. If Leighton lost his ears, and stood in the pillory, 
it was for writing a pamphlet in which he had not only de- 
nounced Episcopacy as Anti-Christ, and the bishops as men 
of blood, and the Queen as a daughter of Heth, but seriously 
suggested that the bishops should be smitten under the fifth 
rib. (Green's ''Short History," p. 512; Gardiner, History of 
England, VI I. , 145, 6). Buckingham assassinated a few 
years before, the Archbishop of St. Andrews murdered a few 
years later, are significant illustrations from history of what 
such a pamphlet meant. It does seem to me that if an ideal 
man could have been confronted with such antagonists, he 
would have found it necessary to make himself odious to them. 
At any rate, this is certainly true. (I take the words from 
Dr. S. R. Gardiner's Introduction to his ''Constitutional 
Documents of the Puritan Revolution," p. xxv.; in 2nd Edition, 

p. XX vi). "Laud was fully penetrated by the conviction 

that he and his friends must either crush the Calvinists or be 
crushed by them." He was quite right. When the Calvinists 
did get intp power, they trampled the Church of England into 
the dust, and silenced her reverend voice for all the seventeen 
years that their power lasted. And withal, while Laud was 
the power behind the throne, not one of these chief and dread- 
ed opponents was sent to death. That fate was reserved for 
Laud himself. 

But the impression is fastened upon the mind of an un- 
studious public, loving rhetoric more than history, and Puri- 
tans better than facts, that Archbishop Laud was a bitter, 
unprincipled persecutor, dealing out fines, imprisonment, 
mutilations, and the horrors of the pillory to any and all 
Englishmen that happened to be opposed to his views. Do 
I exaggerate? Laud Macaulay has made it difficult for me to 
do so. "We are informed," he says, "by Clarendon, that there 
was hardly a man of note in the realm who had not personal 



10 Soldier and Servant Series 

experience of the harshness and the greediness of the Star- 
Chamber." and we have been told before that that Court was 
* 'guided chiefly by the violent temper of the primate." Well, 
Lord Clarendon is a great authority. I shall tell you in a 
moment what he really said. But he did not speak of * 'harsh- 
ness" and ''greediness," and how interesting it would have 
been if Lord Macaulay had added in a footnote the same 
Lord Clarendon's language about the "splendor of the primate's 
piety." I trust that this long prelude may be of some 
use in clearing the ground. However that may be, I will now 
bring before you some notes on Laud as a Churchman, Laud 
as a Statesman, and Laud as a Man. 

L And first of Laud as a Man. 

Whatever else his true picture may contain, and I dare 
not undertake to set before you any full or fair portraiture 
of his character, it must certainly include these six elements, 
a frail, almost sickly body, with an insignificant appearance, 
a keen and eager intellect, a tender, thoughtful heart, a hot 
and sometimes harsh temper, a tremendous and by consequence 
imperious will, and a constant habit of deep devotion. I want 
to dwell somewhat on each of these in turn. 

{a) First, then, my hero had not a heroic body. He was 
a little, insignificant-looking, red-faced man, with little peer- 
ing eyes (he was near-sighted, I imagine), in fact, a man whose 
appearance it was easy to caricature and easy to ridicule. 
The Puritan pamphleteers did it unmercifully. Nay, besides 
ridiculing his stature and his face and calling him by such titles 
as "arch- wolf," "arch-devil," and "the devil's most triumphant 
arch to adorn his victories," these pious adversaries wrote 
about his birth (which was of quiet, honest people of small 
means) in language which would now be considered not only 
mean, but vile. Returning now to the good man's body, he 
never had strong health. "Laud carried with him from his 
birth," says Canon Mozley, "one of those constitutions which 
are always ailing and never failing. He had never good 
health for long together; and his fierce attacks of illness brought 
him sometimes to death's door, leaving him, however, as 
strong for work again as ever, as soon as they were passed. 
A creaking gate lasts; weakness and iron often go together in 
the bodily constitution. There are different kinds of health: 



William Laud, Archbishop 11 

rude and full; slender and wiry; indoors health, and outdoors 
health; reading health, and hunting health; the healths capaci- 
tating respectively for mental and for bodily work. Laud had 
the weakly kind of health eminently; a vigorous, obstinate, 
indoors constitution. His ailings, except when they broke out 
violently, seem only to have operated as a sort of unconscious 
stimulus and mental mustard-plaster, perpetually keeping 
him up to his work, — his internal Puritans." 

Some touches in his letters have given me a suspicion that 
he was always tired, as well he might be, with his frail body 
and his tremendous work. It would hardly be an exaggeration 
to say that this little man, "in bodily presence weak," like a 
certain New Testament Archbishop, and having, like him, 
''the care of all the Churches," had actually set himself to 
know what was going on everywhere in England, and to see 
that it went on right. When a weak body is held up to that 
kind of service by an unflinching spirit, though the spirit feels 
all that body's pains and faintings, and that for more than 
seventy years of life, it may be, as I said, that the body is not 
heroic, but the man is. 

(b) Now I am forced to say something about the intellect 
of this man. Macaulay calls him ''an imbecile," as well as 
"a ridiculous old bigot," mainly, I suppose, because he took 
opposite views of certain situations to those which Macaulay 
himself took two hundred years later. Now a great scholar 
may be a "bigot" and "ridiculous," but hardly an "imbecile," 
and my first point is that Laud had scholarship, and indeed 
became one af the first scholars of his day. "He had a happy 
education in his childhood," we are told by his first biographer, 
"under a very severe schoolmaster." (Heylin, quoted by 
Mozley, p. 111). That severe master begged his pupil to 
remember him when he should become a great man, and the 
boy seems to have impressed his schoolmates in the same way. 
At sixteen years of age he entered St. John's College, Oxford. 
At twenty-one he had been graduated with honors, and had 
won a fellowship. At twenty -eight he was ordained by Bishop 
Young of Rochester, who on examining him "found," we are 
told, "his study raised above the system and opinions of the 
age, on the noble foundations of the Fathers, Councils, and the 
Ecclesiastical Historians, and presaged, that, if he lived, he 



12 Soldier and Servant Series 

would be an instrument of restoring the Church from th 
narrow and private principles of modern times." 

Now that was the impression of scholarship and brains an 
power made by a young man, of a middle-class family of sma 
means, who had thus far no acquaintance at court, no soci; 
power, and no ''pull" in English politics. He had nothir 
but what he was in himself and what he had done at Oxfor( 
to give any cause for imagining that he would ever fill an 
great positions and wield any high authority. I am just goir 
to mention here as illustrating the nature of his mind the 
besides munificent gifts to St. John's College, — a whole ne 
building, etc. — in after times he founded the Laudian Pr( 
fessorship of Arabic in the University, and introduced thei 
the study of Oriental languages, the foundation of all scholar] 
progress in the study of the Old Testament. Few men i 
the England of his day had breadth of scholarship enough, ( 
height of scholarship either, to have done that. But mainly 
am going to ask you to take it on my say-so, that Laud 
controversial writings against Romanism, and other works ( 
his, show a large and masterly scholarship. I must, howeve 
bring out a little what the Oxford career meant. 

We think of Oxford as High-Church and Royalist to tl 
core of its sentimental heart. Behold! The Oxford of Laud 
youth was Puritan and Calvinistic from centre to circun 
ference. There were but two fellows of colleges in the who 
University, where * 'fellows" were numbered by scores, th; 
were known to be what Laud's loving friend and protege ar 
biographer, Heylin, is willing to call * 'Orthodox." The En 
lish Reformers had appealed to the Primitive Church for 
model. In other words, Cranmer and Parker had succeeded 
guiding the English Reformation (in its professed theor 
in the lines of the so-called Oxford Movement of last centur 
But partly from want of scholarly knowledge of the Primiti^ 
Church, and much, very much, more from want of sympatl 
with it, the main line of the clergy and people of Englar 
had swung over into an extreme of Calvinism and Puritanisr 
Both the great universities were absolutely dominated by th; 
kind of religious idea. Laud came to Oxford, a disciple 
the tiny High-Church School that had barely a name to liv 
and he had to fight every inch of his way. Every honor th 



William Laud, Archbishop 13 

he gained was wrung from unwilling authorities. His academic 
theses maddened the very judges who were to pronounce 
upon his success. But he did succeed. He not only extorted 
honors, he disseminated ideas. He made a High-Church 
party in Oxford, and in fifty years from his graduation the 
party that Laud had created was so strong that it dominated 
Oxford in turn, when Laud himself was a forlorn prisoner in 
the Tower, awaiting execution. The turning-point came 
perhaps in 1611, when he stood for the Presidency of St. John's 
College, and got it, being then thirty-eight years old, and as 
yet unknown at court, save that he had once preached before 
King James, two years earlier. The Puritan Vice-Chancellor, 
and all the Puritan party, moved heaven and earth against 
him. He himself was sick in London and could not so much 
as write notes to friends. Nevertheless, the election went in 
his favor, and one of the opposition, in bitter wrath, seized 
the paper containing the votes and tore it in pieces before the 
announcement could be made. Then followed (strangely 
enough) an appeal to the Crown, which only introduced Dr. 
Laud more fully at court, and was decided (not very strangely) 
in his favor. In his diary he notes the day of the decision with 
interest. It was August 29, marked in the English Calendar 
by the commemoration of the Beheading of Saint John the 
Baptist, the ''Saint John" for whom the College was named. 
There came to be another coincidence about this association 
with beheading by and by. I will only add now that the friend- 
less boy who came up to Oxford, as it then was, at sixteen, 
and did this much in twenty-two years, was no imbecile, but 
a man of brains and force of character. 

Perhaps, while I am talking about his intellect I might 
mention two especially common charges, — superstition, and 
a narrow incapacity for understanding the force and fury of 
the popular movement. I will take the second first. He is 
supposed to have lived in himself so much, like a scholarly 
recluse, that he could not take in the idea of how other people 
thought and felt, especially if they thought and felt just as he 
was eager that they should not. Let me suggest, on the other 
hand, that as censor of the press Laud during his Archbishopric 
had the largest possible opportunity of knowing the symptoms 
of discontent. He was constantly receiving reports also from 



14 Soldier and Servant Series 

every part of the realm, and he was not a scholarly recluse, 
but the most active man of affairs, probably, in the three 
Kingdoms. Nor are we without indications that he regarded 
the royal policy as ruinous. In his correspondence with 
Strafford, we find both complaining of a mixture of policies, 
their own, strong and active, and another, slow and temporizing 
and feeble. ''Thorough" was the watchword that these two 
friends were always interchanging, but hear how Laud speaks 
of it in a letter written in 1637, three years before the first 
movement toward his fall from power, — ''What think you of 
Thorough when there can be such slips in business of conse- 
quence?" He is speaking of the blunder of putting Prynne, 
Burton, and Bastwick in the pillory, and then allowing them 
to harangue a crowd of applauding friends with seditious and 
treasonable utterances during the whole time of their supposed 
punishment, which was a foolish way to punish sedition, and 
not Laud's way at all. "It is true," Laud presently goes on, 
"that some men speak as your Lordship writes, but when 
anything comes to be acted against them there is little or 
nothing done, nor shall I ever live to see it otherwise." Straf- 
ford returned a playful answer, but Laud was serious and would 
not joke, this time, though they joked together much, and 
in fact, so much as to show that Laud had that invaluable 
sense of humor which is one of the best antidotes to narrowness. 
"I have given up," he says with a melancholy solemnity, — 
"I have given up expecting of Thorough." So too those dreams 
about which we are presently to say somewhat, are the dreams 
of a melancholy and anxious man. Here is one which came 
about four years before his death. I will give it just as it 
stands in the Archbishop's diary. 

"Jan. 24. Friday, At night I dreamed, that my Father 
(who died 46 years since) came to me; and to my thinking, 
he was as well and as cheerful, as ever I saw him. He asked 
me what I did here? And after some Speech, I asked him how 
long he would stay with me? He answered; he would stay, 
till he had me away with him. I am not moved with Dreams ; 
yet I thought fit to remember this." 

The fact is that people assume that Laud foresaw no evil 
because he did not turn aside for any. My own reading of him 
is that he lived for years in fear and heaviness of spirit, but 



William Laud, Archbishop 15 

did not feel at liberty at any time to change his course, in 
order to save his power, his possessions, his freedom, or even 
his life. 

But having given one of his dreams, I must deal with that 
other charge. His mind had the smallness of superstition. 
Well, yes! He does record dream after dream in his diary, 
between twenty-five and thirty of them in twenty years. Here 
is one of them: 

''A. D. 1626. March 8. Thursday, I came to London. 
The night following, I dreamed, that I was reconciled to the 
Church of Rome. This troubled me much; and I wondered 
exceedingly how it should happen. Nor was I aggrevied with 
myself [only by Reason of the Errors of that Church, but also] 
upon account of the Scandal, which from my fall would be 
cast upon many eminent and Learned Men in the Church of 
England.* So being troubled in my dream, I said to myself 
that I would go immediately, and confessing my fault, would 
beg pardon of the Church of England. Going with this resolu- 
tion, a certain Priest met me and would have stopped me. 
But moved with indignation, I went on my way. And while I 
wearied myself with these troublesome thoughts I awoke. 
Herein I felt such strong impressions; that I could scarce 
believe it to be a Dream." 

You will observe that there is no indication of attaching 
any importance to this. You have heard him say of his dream 
of his father, 'T am not moved with dreams; yet I thought fit 
to remember this." I will give one more, and then I will 
moralize a little. In 1635, in the Diary for Oct. 18, we find this: 

*T dreamed that I was going out in haste, and that when I 
came into my outer Chamber, there was my Servant Will: 
Pennell in the same riding-suit which he had on that day seven- 
night at Hampton Court with me. Me-thought I wondered 
to see him (for I left him sick at home) and asked him, how he 
did, and what he made there. And that he answered, he came 
to receive my Blessing; and with that fell on his knees. That 
hereupon I laid my Hand upon his Head, and Prayed over 
him, and therewith awaked. When I was up, I told this to 



* Prynne, presenting extracts from the Diary at the Archbishop's trial, 
actually quoted this dream, omitting the words which I have placed in 
brackets! 



16 Soldier and Servant Series 

them of my Chamber; and added, that I should find Pennell 
dead or dying. My coach came; and when I came home I 
found him past Sense, and giving up the Ghost. So my Prayers 
(as they had frequently before) commended him to God." 

The next year, I must add, he has another dream, which 
comes true next day, and he sets it all down, but adds ''Somniis 
tamen hand multum fidoj' * 'Nevertheless, I don't put much 
trust in dreams." 

It remains that he did write down many dreams, and also 
such curious happenings as that two robin redbreasts flew 
into his study, to which he attaches no hint of a meaning, and 
again, when his troubles were very dark around him, that he 
went into his Library and found his own picture fallen from 
the wall and lying face downwards on the floor, and it made him 
sad. Was he then a drivelling fool? 

I venture to say that he was not, but that in an age when 
the government of the world by law was hardly dreamed of in 
comparison with what we know to-day, and when the most 
scientific minds still regarded God's providences as what we 
should now call particular and arbitrary, this man, filled with 
an intense and clinging faith in a heavenly Father, regarded 
every happening of every day as in some sort a special message 
of that Father. Please observe that he was separated from 
the victims of a vulgar superstition in two points. He did not 
pretend to be able to interpret these messages and map out 
the future by them (with one exception when his profound 
impression proved to be a true one), and again, and more 
especially, when he began to think that God was trying to 
make him think of impending misfortune and death, he did 
not meanly try to run away from such things, but only set 
his house in order so as to be ready to meet them with a pre- 
pared soul, if they should come. I fully believe that a Christian 
man ought sometimes to read the conditions of life as signs 
in just that way, even in this twentieth century, saying, not 
*'I am sure that such a thing is going to happen," but **I 
wonder if God wants me to think about such and such a thing, 
that my circumstances keep suggesting it so curiously. And if 
He does want me to think about it as a possibility; what in 
particular would He have me think?" Such was, I believe, 
the working of the mind of Laud. Certainly he was in his 



William Laud, Archbishop 17 

religion preeminently a filial, rather than a meanly fearful, soul. 

Before I leave Laud's intellect, I must add one thing more. 
The number of Littell's "Living Age" for Oct. 31, 1874, re- 
prints from "Eraser's Magazine" a notable article on Arch- 
bishop Laud by a Scottish Presbyterian writer. It is of the 
utmost value as coming from a fair-minded foe, who is sharply 
opposed to Laud, but cannot swallow Macaulay. I must 
quote a part of one of his telling paragraphs. 

"If," he says, "we were required without going into the details 
of his history to give some means of measuring the abilities 
of Laud, to account for the part he played in affairs, and to 
understand why the Puritans doomed him to death, we should 
name his correspondence with Strafford. Lord Macaulay 
exhausts his powers of language in extolling the genius and 
energy of Strafford, but he does not explain the surprising 
circumstance that the Jove-like Wentworth should have found 
his friend of friends in a 'ridiculous old bigot.' It is impossible 
to read Strafford's letters to Laud without perceiving that the 
statesman profoundly respects and implicitly trusts the divine. 
'Your grace,' writes Strafford from Ireland, 'whom, I protest 
upon my faith, I reverence more than any other subject in 
the whole world, and to whose judgment I shall sooner lean 
and trust myself than my own.' " Then, after some more 
extracts, my writer goes on to this comment on Laud's side 
of the correspondence. "As we mark the combination of 
firmness with tenderness, of frankness with delicacy (note those 
words from an opponent, "tenderness," "delicacy"), of judg- 
ment, sound and shrewd, with sympathy and intelligence in 
his answer, we are forced to believe that Strafford was not 
fundamentally wrong in his conception of the man." 

(c, d, e) I have given extraordinary space to the considera- 
tion of Laud's intellect. I think that it was not unreasonable. 
A man's intellectual character is a very large part of his whole 
character, especially if he have one of the strongest and best- 
trained minds of his day, and the Macaulay picture did need 
so much retouching. I will now proceed a little more rapidly, 
combining in one view the next three features that I promised 
to discuss, — the tender, sympathetic heart, the harsh temper, 
and the imperious will, with its somewhat overbearing and 
tryannous habit. 



18 Soldier and Servant Series 

Everybody agrees that Laud had a peculiarly sensitive 
spirit. There is no need to argue that point. It comes out over 
and over. The entry in his diary, not long before his downfall, 
in which he mentions not going out till the evening to avoid 
the gazing of the crowd, his dreams in which he sees courtiers 
railing and jeering at him, his anxious jottings about coldness 
by this one and that one, the language used in his private 
devotions about difficulties and enemies and slanderers and 
trouble of many kinds, illustrate this point beyond perad ven- 
ture. They help also to show that this great man did not live 
in a fool's paradise for most of his life, as some seem to think . 
But a very sensitive man may be a very selfish man, — he is 
singularly apt to be, — and that is Lord Macaulay's view of 
Laud. He writes him * 'peevish," * 'malignant," "quick to feel 
for his own dignity, slow to sympathize with the sufferings of 
others." We remark that a man of deeply ingrained selfish- 
ness cannot live and die for a cause with the intense and 
persistent self-sacrifice that Laud bestowed upon the English 
Church and nation. Yet it may be retorted, not unreasonably, 
that a man may be vastly unselfish in that high sense, and yet 
vastly unsympathetic toward human suffering and sorrow in 
the individual cases around him. Laud lived for a cause, not 
for himself. No doubt of that. He was magnificently generous 
to Oxford University, and to St. John's College in particular, 
when it would serve the great cause that he had at heart. 
No doubt about that, either. But I look for something more 
to show real human sympathy with human hearts, and I 
think I find it. The Diary shows him tender of his poor about 
Lambeth. They gathered in hundreds to take farewell of him 
when he went to his trial. * He was tender of his native town 
of Reading, and especially for the poor of the town. His first 
act, when he became parish priest, was to set apart out of 
his living a provision for the care of twelve poor men. As a 
minister of State, he reformed the English system of taxation, 
so that it should fall less heavily upon the poor and more upon 
the rich, and of course this was a source of fearful unpopularity 
and abuse, t So, too, he befriended an old apple- woman who 

* "As I went to my barge," says the Diary, "hundreds of my poor 
neighbors stood there, and prayed for my safety and return to my house. 
For which I bless God and them." 

t Laud was a sort of a Seventeenth Century Lloyd George. But, alas! 
he came down too soon! 



William Laud, Archbishop 19 

had been forbidden by the Lord Mayor of London to ply her 
trade in St. Paul's Churchyard, over which, as it happened, 
his Worship had no jurisdiction. Laud thought the matter 
not too small to bring his Worship before the Privy Council 
for, and warned him to mind his own business for the future. 
No sympathy here for pompous Lord Mayors breaking the 
law, but perhaps some for the apple-woman. Again, he was 
tender of his servants. We have seen how he dreamed of the 
sick man of his household coming and asking for his blessing. 
In a like spirit we read in the diary his note on the death of his 
steward: **Mr. Adam Forbes, my Ancient, Loving, and Trusty 
Servant, then my Steward, after he had served me full 42 
years, dyed, to my great loss and grief." 

Again, he could be sympathetic with virulent opponents. 
We saw how a Fellow of St. John's College tore up the scrutiny- 
paper, to try to prevent Laud's election. What do you suppose 
a "narrow," "peevish," and "malignant" man, and above all, 
an "imbecile old bigot," would have done about it? What 
Laud did was to hold a court to try the offence, as was proper, 
and after it had been properly condemned by authority, then 
to come down and embrace the offender, and propose to forgive 
and forget. He not only thoroughly reconciled the man, but 
eventually got him Church promotion, married him to his 
(Laud's) niece, and at last made him his successor in that very 
office of President of St. John's College. 

Again, I shall instance Laud's two great court friendships, 
with Buckingham and Strafford. No one with a reasonable 
eye for indications can fail to see that these were not mere 
political alliances, but tender personal attachments, both oi 
them. "Quick to feel for his own dignity," was he? Certainly 
he was, and he had some to feel for. That sensitive old man 
went to the block with a splendid dignity as well as a child- 
like faith. "Slow to feel for the sufferings of others," we are 
told. Ah! but when he saw another man suffer, his dignity 
broke down. When he lifted up his hands to perform the last 
office of priest and friend for his beloved Strafford, asking his 
blessing as he passed beneath the window of his prison, or 
his way to execution, the aged Archbishop — and old age, yoi; 
know, is apt to shrink into itself and care less than of yore foi 
others' joys or griefs — that old man, who was going himself sc 



20 Soldier and Servant Series 

cheerfully to such a trial a little later, fainted dead away from 
overmastering anguish at the thought of the cruel wrong done 
this, his friend. 

Of the unshakableness of this sensitive spirit I am not going 
to say much. Everybody knows that he had it. In the very 
striking words of the Scottish writer whom I have quoted be- 
fore, "He made his soul Hke unto a wedge!" Only I ask you 
to think how much that means for a man who felt unpopularity 
with a peculiar depth of misery, and who knew that in living for 
others as he felt bound to live, he was simply courting unpopu- 
larity. Hear him answering Strafford's wish that in his office 
of Archbishop of Canterbury he might have "many and happy 
days." "But truly, my lord," says the new primate, "I look 
for neither: not for many, for I am in years, and I have had 
a troublesome life; not for happy, for I have no hope to do the 
good I desire." That is the martyr's spirit, of a truth, giving 
up life and happiness for an object, while inwardly assured that 
one cannot in this world's way of measuring, accomplish the 
object after all. 

But while a tremendous will is a splendid gift of God to any 
man, and the cultivation of such under a Christian conscience 
is a great virtue, yet such a gift is apt to betray its possessor 
into some unworthy using thereof. We must look at the charges 
of harsh temper and overbearing and tyrannous disregard of 
individual liberty. Partly I have confessed them. The Arch- 
bishop used to confess them himself. He was too deep a 
Christian not to have made a study of his own faults. He 
knew himself irritable and hasty, and tried to learn more of 
self-government. "Lord, give me patience," is a common 
entry, as I recall my impressions of the Diary. But, partly, I 
think that the common picture is much overdrawn. Laud 
was vilely slandered and infamously abused during all his 
career as a stateman. If he was ugly toward his enemies, it 
would inevitably appear in the intimacies of his Diary. Behold! 
the worst things he has to say about them are such as I can 
give you in the two following extracts, one preceding, and one 
following, his promotion to the Archbishopric: "(1632) Feb. 28, 
Thursday, Mr. Chancellour of London, Dr. Duck (Laud was 
then Bishop of London), brought me word, how miserably I 



William Laud, Archbishop 21 

was slandered by some Separatists. I pray God give me 
patience and forgive them." 

*X1633) Nov. 13, Wednesday about the begin- 
ning of this month the Lady Davies Prophesied against me, 
that I should very few Days out-live the Fifth of November. 
And a little after that, one Green came into Court at St. 
James's with a great sword by his Side, swearing the King 
should do him Justice against me. All the wrong I ever did 
this Man, was, that being a poor Printer, I procured him of 
the Company of the Stationers 5 pounds a Year during his 
Life. God preserve me and forgive him. He was committed 
to Newgate." 

''Committed to Newgate," you will observe, simply to pre- 
vent him from carrying out an avowed purpose of assassina- 
tion. Undoubtedly, in an age of personal government, when 
about every really great man that one reads of was high-handed 
and over-bearing, according to the notions of to-day, this 
great man was so too. Oliver Cromwell was quite as much so 
in later days. John Knox and John Calvin had been quite as 
much so in a time gone by, each according to the utmost of his 
opportunity. It is interesting right here to ask how Laud 
comes to be painted blacker in these respects than other men, 
with whom he is simply in close parallel. Well, first, it is 
because Laud was identified with the Stuarts, and the Stuart 
cause has been a hopelessly lost cause in England, with the ex- 
ception of a little space of less than thirty years, ever since 
Laud was put to death. That has segregrated him from English 
sympathies. Few people have even wished to do him justice. 

But another and truly glorious cause of his ill name is this,— 
he was a universal radical reformer. It should be remembered, 
but is always forgotten, that the punishments inflicted by 
courts and councils in which Laud figured were all inflicted 
upon law-breakers. They seem to be supposed in these days 
to be specimens of mere malicious mischief dealt out to all 
persons whom the Archbishop did not like. Far from it! They 
were all penalties of broken law or injured right. But certain 
laws and certain rights were very unpopular in the England 
of those days. Take, first, the matter of Church property, 
in which Laud interested himself very keenly. In Tudor days 
Henry VIII. had set the example of spoliation by plundering 



22 Soldier and Servant Series 

the monasteries and allowing a large part of the spoil to go to 
the landed proprietors, who indeed in many cases simply 
helped themselves to the material of abandoned monastic 
buildings without the form of a grant. Under Edward VI. 
the Churches nearly all over the land were despoiled of all 
property which the rising Protestantism of the time could 
conveniently label as ''superstitious," and that was much. 
This process, sternly checked for a while under Mary, was 
renewed under Elizabeth. What was the consequence by 
the time the Stuarts came to the throne? Why, the landed 
gentry had come to feel that the Churches and largely the 
Church property of rural England were in their hands to do 
with about as they liked. The "squires" were the natural 
trustees and protectors of the Church's property in the rural 
district. It had come to pass that they had largely lost the 
sense of their proper responsibilities as guardians of sacred 
things, and had become plunderers with the air of proprietors. 
If a rich man wanted a larger house and saw the Parish Church 
only half hlled, he was ready to pull down a transept and build 
his new wing with the stone. If he found the Parish Church 
unreasonably rich in massive old silverware and elegant vest- 
ments, he would take the silver for his sideboard, and the velvet, 
or satin, or cloth of gold for his lady's gown. The Church had 
been the guardian of morals for the nation, also, in older times, 
and the Post-Reformation Church was undoubtedly a church 
not feared as it had been, but much weakened and despised; 
and a lamentable decay of morals had followed. There was 
a reign of lawlessness all through the land, and Laud was 
determined to bring in a reign of law instead. King James, 
with a keen Scottish shrewdness, detected in him a "restless" 
spirit and refused to promote him. Laud was just the sort of 
man who in a "prohibition State," like Maine, would try to 
enforce the prohibitory law in summer hotels and among 
gentlemen, as well as in back streets and piggeries. I have 
already mentioned Macaulay's statement quoted from Claren- 
don, "that there was hardly a man of note in the realm who 
had not had personal experience of the harshness and greediness 
of the Star Chamber." One is left to suppose that these per- 
sons of note were guilty of no other offense than having a 



William Laud, Archbishop 23 

Puritan conscience. I take pleasure, therefore, in quoting 
Clarendon's own words: 

* 'Persons of honor and great quality of the court and of 
the country were every day cited into the High Commission 
court"— that is Clarendon's real testimony— * 'upon the fame 
of their incontinence, or other scandal in their lives, and were 
there prosecuted to their shame and punishment." 

Naturally, such persons didn't like Laud. Sad to say, they 
appealed successfully to Puritan prejudice against him. The 
first beginning of Laud's downfall after his arrest (December 18 
1640) is (December 20) his being fined 500 pounds for wrongful 
imprisonment of a nobleman. The nobleman had been notori- 
ously guilty of long-continued adulterous union with a lady 
of rank.* 

Returning for a moment to Church property matters, let 
me give you one example of ''Laud's tyranny." A Mr. Fresh- 
field, Recorder of Salisbury, was fined 500 pounds — which may 
be even $10,000 in present-day value, I suppose — for so small 
an offence as running his cane through a stained-glass window 
in a Church, containing a representation (of God the Father 
symbolized as an old man) which offended his conscience. 
" Enormously disproportionate fine," says even one of my own 
party, an English Churchman, the late Canon Perry, of Lin- 
coln Cathedral. I ask you to stop and think. Suppose the 
existence of Raphael's Sistine Madonna was seriously threat- 
ened by a fanatical Protestant sect in Saxony. Would it be 
reasonable and just to deal with such a danger by mild meas- 
ures? If rich men were in it, should they not be well assured 
that no moderate fines would be their portion, if they were 
caught mutilating one of the world's chief treasures? Well, 
look at the Salisbury case again. The art of the medieva 
glass-workers is hopelessly lost. A little of it, nay, a good dea 
of it, still remains in England in this reign of Charles L, and 
Puritan fanaticism threatens it all with irreparable destruction, 

* I find in S. R. Gardiner's "History of England" (VIIL, 121-2) a re 
markable testimony in this connection. "It is possible that Laud migh 
have carried his point of reducing the clergy to discipline, if he had left tJu 
laity alone. It is possible that he might have succeeded in meting out cqun 
laiv to the rich and poor, if he had left the Puritan Cler.gy to worship according 
to their conscience. As it was, he irritated all classes in turn." [Italics ar( 
mine, not Dr. Gardiner's.] According to this view, Laud died for meting ou 
equal law to rich and poor. Let that be remembered of him! 



24 Soldier and Servant Series 

Is it vindictive, malignant, bigoted, to make an awful example 
of a man of education, wealth, and position, an officer of the 
law and of the Crown, who is found to have destroyed in wilful 
hatred a piece of public property that can never be restored, 
at a time when a large part of uneducated, lawless, and irre- 
sponsible England is hesitating over the question whether to 
make an onslaught on all such property, or no? Laud did not 
succeed. There are hardly more than a few fragments of 
medieval glass left in England to-day. But my sympathies 
are with him. The glass ought to have been saved.* 

I suspect that there was one more cause of Laud's reputation 
for harshness and tyranny. He was of a middle-class family. 
It is inconceivable that he had not been subjected to the galling 
combination of condescension, insult, and neglect, with which 
the unconscientious great people in any, even a republican, form 
of society, always treat the people that are smaller. I think 
that he suffered from the meanness of the upper-class people in 
his youth, and learned to know their characteristic faults 
thoroughly and detest them profoundly. I do not think it 
was revenge. I am sure he was too good a Christian for that. 
But certainly when he had come to be a great man himself, 
he loved to take down a certain sort of great people, and he 
did it with immense power. He sent for the Lord Chief Justice 
of England, himself an elderly man, and a man of strong nature, 
to come before the Privy Council, and there scolded him for a 
certain disregard of the royal authority. It was no weakling, 
who even in that coign of vantage could send the Lord Chief 
Justice away in tears. But it was almost always that sort of 
people, the great people of England, that Laud treated in that 
way. You will remember the Lord Mayor and the apple- 
woman. On the other hand, the author of a bitter contem- 
porary pamphlet. The True Character of an Untrue Bishop, 
says of him, *'He observeth the Scripture in the spirit of it, 
useth his greatest adversaries with most meekness, I mean, of 



* But after all I find in Gardiner (History of England, VII, 148) this 
statement: "In truth, the enormous fines which have left such a mark on 
the history of this reign [of Charles L] were seldom exacted, and becanie 
little more than a conventional mode in which the judges expressed their 
horror at the offence, except so far as they may have been intended to bring 
the offender to an early confession of his fault." 




THE TOWER OF LONDON 
FROM THE RIVER, SHOWING THE TRAITOR'S GATE. 



William Laud, Archbishop 25 

the separation of the noncomformists."* He did set down 
great men very hard, when they came before him as offenders. 
He was gentle to the small. That is a noble kind of bad temper, 
certainly, if one m.ust have a bad temper at all. 

(/) I said that to make up any fair presentation of the man, 
one must include a deep and constant piety. I should be glad 
to dwell much on that part of our Archbishop's character, 
and it would be simple justice. Macaulay, indeed, found 
somewhere a statement that in the correspondence of Laud 
and Strafford no sense of duty to God or man ever appears as 
a motive, and he defends that statement. Friends of justice 
point out that here or there in that correspondence occurs 
mention of good works such as ordinary Christians do from 
such motives. The ready answer is that in the case of Laud 
and Strafford no such motive is to be credited to them unless 
it is expressly mentioned. To such a critic nothing can be 
proved but that which he desires to see. If, on the other hand, 
a lover of Laud says that his Diary shows him to have been 
one who walked with God in a peculiar, filial intimacy, all 
through his career, that again must be somewhat unconvinc- 
ing, unless the Diary can be laid before the inquirer's eye in 
all its long self-revelation. I venture, therefore, to rest my 
whole case as to the character of the martyr's piety on the 
story of the martyrdom itself. A man cannot walk with Goc 
serenely, in a tender, familiar intimacy, on the scaffold where 
the headsman is waiting for him with ax and block, unless the 
man has had much practice in walking with God, and learnec 
the lessons of a deep experience, in some easier time gone by 

The day of the Archbishop's death was January 10. Always 
an observer of coincidences, he could not but note with a certain 
pleasure that it was the day of commemoration of Saint 

* This is quoted by dear old Thomas Fuller in his "Church History o 
Britain" (VI., 299). The Puritan writer winds off his sentence thus 
"Concluding that diversity of opinion will beget their ruin and establisl 
him in his station." Truly a prophetic word. 

Let me note here a contrast. Laud sends the Lord Chief Justice awa; 
vowing through tears that he has been "choked with a pair of lawn sleeves.' 
Laud has his arch-enemy Prynne before him, and when the Court condemn 
the man to imprisonment without books, and without pens, ink, and paper 
protests that such punishment would be barbarous, and secures the remissioi 
of that part of the sentence. To tell how Prynne treated Laud in prison ii 
the Tower would make another interesting picture, but I have not space fo 
it. 



26 Soldier and Servant Series 

William, Archbishop of Bourges, in the Calendar of the French 
Church. St. William had had his Puritans, too, the Albigenses 
of the twelfth century, and had distinguished himself by re- 
fusing to join in persecuting them to death after the evil 
fashion of his day. Our Archbishop had slept soundly till 
his servants came to wake him, — **a most assured sign," says 
his biographer, "of a soul prepared." 

*ln the morning he was early at his prayers," says Heyhn, 
**at which he continued till Pennington, Lieutenant of the 
Tower, and other public officers, came to conduct him to the 
scaffold, which he ascended with so brave a courage, such a 
cheerful countenance, as if he had mounted rather to behold 
a triumph than be made a sacrifice; and came not there to die, 
but be translated. And though some rude and uncivil people 
reviled him as he passed along, with opprobrious language, 
as loath to let him go to the grave in peace, yet it never dis- 
composed his thoughts nor disturbed his patience. For he 
had profited so well in the school of Christ, that, 'when he was 
reviled, he reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened 
not, but committed his cause to Him that judgeth righteously.' " 

What the Archbishop had to say to the people was care- 
fully written down. Indeed, it is recorded that after reading it, 
he turned to a reporter, and begged him particularly not to 
put forth an inaccurate account. He might not have read the 
paper exactly, but by the carefully written word he wished to 
be judged. *'I beseech you, let me have no wrong done me." 
**Sir, you shall not," said the reporter. "U I do so, let it fall 
upon my own head. I pray God, have mercy upon your soul." 
**I thank you," the martyr said. *'I did not speak with any 
jealousy, as if you would do so, but only, as a poor man going 
out of the world, it is not possible for me to keep to the words 
of my paper, and a phrase might do me wrong." Here, then, 
are some extracts from that paper by which Laud asks so 
anxiously to be judged. 

The Archbishop's Speech upon the Scaffold. 

"Good people, — This is an uncomfortable time to preach; 
yet I shall begin with a text of Scripture, Hebrews xii. 2: 
'Let us run with patience the race that is set before us: looking 
unto Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our faith, Who, for 



William Laud, Archbishop 27 

the joy that was set before Him, endured the Cross, despising 
the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of 
God/ 

"I have been long in my race; and how I have looked to 
Jesus, the Author and Finisher of my faith. He best knows. I 
am now come to the end of my race; and here I find the Cross, 
a death of shame. But the shame must be despised, or no 
coming to the right hand of God. Jesus despised the shame for 
me, and God forbid but that I should despise the shame for 
Him. 

"I am going apace, as you see, towards the Red Sea, and 
my feet are now upon the very brink of it; an argument, I 
hope, that God is bringing me into the Land of Promise; for 
that was the way through which He led His people. 

**But before they came to it, He instituted a passover for 
them. A lamb it was, but it must be eaten with sour herbs. 
I shall obey, and labor to digest the sour herbs as well as the 
lamb. And I shall remember it is the Lord's passover. I shall 
not think of the herbs, nor be angry with the hand that gather- 
eth them; but look up only to Him who instituted that, and 
governs these; for men can have no more power over me than 
what is given them from above. 

"I am not in love with this passage through the Red Sea, 
for I have the weakness and infirmities of flesh and blood 
plentifully in me. And I have prayed with my Saviour, ut 
transiret calix isle, that this cup of red wine might pass from 
me. But if not, God's will, not mine, be done. And I shall 
most willingly drink of this cup, as deep as He pleases, and 
enter into this sea, yea, and pass through it, in the way that 
He shall lead me." 

So the speech began. Very much that the Archbishop was 
greatly concerned to say to the people of England I shall pass 
over. He was moved to show by many examples that servants 
of God were very liable to suffer misrepresentation and perse- 
cution and death. He had a carefully prepared defense tc 
offer for himself. But I am concerned here with nothing but 
his relations with God. So I pass on to the closing words. 

"But I have done. I forgive all the world, all and every oj 
those bitter enemies which have persecuted me; and humbl> 



28 Soldier and Servant Series 

desire to be forgiven, of God first, and then of every man. And 
so I heartily desire you to join in prayer with me. 

"O eternal God and merciful Father, look down upon me 
in mercy, in the riches and fulness of all Thy mercies. Look 
upon me, but not till Thou hast nailed my sins to the Cross 
of Christ, not till Thou hast bathed me in the blood of Christ, 
not till I have hid myself in the wounds of Christ; that so the 
punishment due unto my sins may pass over me. And since 
Thou art pleased to try me to the uttermost, I most humbly 
beseech Thee, give me now, in this great instant, full patience, 
proportionable comfort, and a heart ready to die for Thine 
honour, the King's happiness, and this Church's preservation. 
And my zeal to these (far from arrogancy be it spoken) is all 
the sin (human frailty excepted, and all the incidents thereto) 
which is yet known to me in this particular, for which I come 
now to suffer; I say, in this particular of treason. But other- 
wise, my sins are many and great; Lord, pardon them all, 
and those especially (whatever they are), which have drawn 
down this present judgment upon me. And when Thou hast 
given me strength to bear it, do with me as seems best in Thine 
own eyes. Amen." 

Then followed the Lord's Prayer, and then he set himself 
to die. So far we have seen his formal preparation, the things 
which he carefully arranged with himself beforehand. The 
things which follow are more significant, because they are 
things unrehearsed. So many people had been allowed to 
get up on the scaffold that there was scant accommodation for 
the tragedy to be enacted there. The temper of the born mana- 
ger of men, who could not abide to see anything botched, and 
was deeply accustomed to ordering people and scolding people, 
flashes out for a moment. '1 thought there would have been 
an empty scaffold, that I might have had room to die." The 
complaint was felt to be just, and a space was cleared. Then 
there came a manifestation of that other side of the man, 
his tenderness for the poor and the unregarded, that had 
marked him all through his life. He saw broad chinks between 
the boards of the scaffold, and that some people had crowded 
in under the very place of the block. He would have these 
removed, or else have the crevices filled with saw-dust, 'lest 
my innocent blood should fall upon the heads of the people." 



William Laud, Archbishop 29 

God gave the martyr a chance to show what spirit he was of, 
by sending an adversary at the last to catch him unaware. An 
Irishman, Sir John Clotworthy, a Puritan fanatic, of the type 
that is known to us under the name of ''Orangeman," assailed 
him rudely to show before the crowd how little this ecclesi- 
astic knew of true religion and divine grace. "What," he asked, 
"is the comfortablest saying which a dying man would have 
in his mouth?" ''Cupio dissolvi et esse cum ChristoJ' was the 
reply. It was a Latin version of "I desire to depart and to be 
with Christ;" and the martyr, with the flashing quickness of 
his mind still unabated at the age of seventy-one, seized on 
that word, ''dissolvi'' ("to be taken to pieces") of the Latin 
Vulgate, so touchingly applicable to his departing. "That is 
a good desire," said the inquisitor, "but there must be a founda- 
tion for that divine assurance." "No man can express it," 
was the quiet reply. "It is to be found within." The intruder 
was still urgent. "It is founded upon a word, nevertheless, 
and that word should be known." "That word," was the firm 
answer,— "That word is the knowledge of Jesus Christ and 
that alone." "But he saw that this was but an indecent inter- 
ruption, and that there would be no end to the trouble," says 
the biographer, "and so he turned away from him to the exe- 
cutioner, as the gentler and discreeter person; and, putting 
some money into his hand, without the least distemper or 
change of countenance, he said, 'Here, honest friend, God 
forgive thee, and do thine office upon me in mercy." Then did 
he go upon his knees, and the executioner said that he should 
give a sign for the blow to come; to which he answered, "I will, 
but first let me fit myself.' " 

Then the martyr knelt down to say his last prayer on earth. 
It was no artfully premeditated thing. A great theologian, 
like Laud, would never have allowed a written prayer to pass 
his criticism, in which the first sentences were addressed to the 
Divine Son, Jesus Christ, and the last, with an unconscious 
change of the heart's attitude, to the Divine Father "for Jesus 
Christ's sake." It is the unveiling before us of a devout heart 
taken off its guard, in the utter simplicity of its most natural, 
untutored speech. 

"Lord, I am coming as fast as I can. I know I must pass 
through the shadow of death before I can come to see Thee. 



30 Soldier and Servant Series 

But it is but umbra mortis, a mere shadow of death, a little 
darkness upon nature; but thou by Thy merits and passion 
hast broken through the jaws of death. So, Lord, receive my 
soul, and have mercy upon me ; and bless this kingdom with 
peace and plenty, and with brotherly love and charity, that 
there may not be this effusion of Christian blood amongst them 
for Jesus Christ His sake, if it be Thy will." 

'Then he bowed his head upon the block, 'down as upon a 
bed,' and prayed silently awhile." So says the biographer. 
"No man knows what it was he said in that last prayer. After 
that he said out loud, 'Lord, receive my soul,' which was the 
sign to the executioner, and at one blow he was beheaded." 

"Near the sword, near to God," is a saying of another 
martyr Bishop, Ignatius of Antioch in the second Christian 
century. I think that it applies to the story of the death of 
William Laud. Different minds will weigh its details with 
different results. For myself, I feel that this is one of those 
narratives where heaven is opened. We cannot see in, ourselves, 
but it is our privilege to go down on our knees, and mark how 
the glory of the divine light falls on the face of one who sees 
the vision of God. 

IL Of Laud as a Statesman I really think that I have said 
the worst, when I have said that he believed in the Divine 
Right of Kings. "What could be worse?" you will say. But 
let me remind you, first, that most of the best men of that age 
had been brought up to that belief, and, secondly, that in 
Laud's holding it had a true side to it. It is quite true that 
when God in His providence does allow a man to be an absolute 
monarch, God makes that man a trustee of his subjects' welfare. 
Laud made the mistake of supposing that God had no other 
scheme for the government of humanity, and that to try to 
abridge the royal power, and transfer the trust in large measure 
to an oligarchy of upper-class people, — the nobility, the gentry, 
and the rich tradespeople, — was a sin. Nobody, no, not even 
Hampden and Pym, dreamed of a day of universal suffrage, 
of voters having neither property, nor education, nor character, 
and all that. If they had had such a vision set before them, they 
would have shrunk from it like Laud himself. As a matter of 
fact, also, the rival, the revolutionary, government that was 



William Laud, Archbishop 31 

actually set up in England by Laud's opponents, was so intoler- 
ably bad beyond the very worst of his, that it collapsed and 
was thrown off with loud rejoicings before twenty years were 
out. Certainly Laud was trying to accomplish something 
that would have been bad for England. Certainly he was too 
ready to trust to the chances of touching the conscience and 
educating the mind of an absolute king, and not trustful 
enough of the power of truth to make itself heard by people 
taken in handfuls. I only claim that he was not a fool, and 
that his opponents made a worse mess of governing than he 
did. Then I add that God, who holds the balances of history, 
and holds them true, brought out of Laud's defeat and his 
adversaries' victory and their rapid following overthrow, and 
many other such alternations, that healthful development 
of our mother land which neither the one party nor the other, * 
taken by themselves, were capable of forecasting or promoting. 
The subject tempts me, and I could write long upon it, but 
I forbear, and leave it with only a hint, but I do allow myself 
to hope that it may be an illuminative hint. 

in. And so I pass to Laud as a Churchman. It was the 
side of his development that Laud himself cared most for, 
and I venture to say that it is the side where he will eventually 
appear at his very best. 

The Reformation of the Church of England had been pro- 
fessedly a studious and careful return to the principles and 

* As showing that distrust of government by the people has not entirely 
disappeared from thoughtful minds, I quote the following from a paper on 
the late Lord Salisbury by M. Augustin Filon {Living Age, Jan. 4, 1896). 
He speaks of the phenomenon of a great people passing smoothly from aris- 
tocracy to democracy. "At first I thought it an admirable spectacle, but 
latterly a little doubt and uncertainty began to creep into my mind." He 
imagines old leaders dying and old policies failing, and the rise of a popular 
movement upsetting all the old traditions of government in England. "Would 
the starving have to minister to their own needs, and to create for themselves 
such laws as they should think good? I know democracy well; I have seen 
its work at close quarters in diverse countries. I believe in its needs and its 
sufferings, but / have small faith in its virtues, and still less in its intelligence." 
[Italics are mine.] That was Laud's idea of democracy. For myself, I believe 
that evolution is a truth, and not a trick. I hold that the great evolution of 
humanity has shown God's purpose to devolve the responsibility of govern- 
ment upon all men (and all women), except criminals and defectives. But 
I note that Laud had not seen enough of that evolution to be responsible for 
discerning how the Finger of God pointed. Let it be remembered that in 
trying to remedy inequalities of taxation Laud was a statesman far ahead ol 
his age. 



32 William Laud, Archbishop 

belief and practice of the Catholic Church as it came from 
our Lord Jesus Christ and His first Apostles. Some of the 
Anglican leaders, notably Cranmer, really meant this pro- 
fession seriously. They studied Fathers and Councils pro- 
foundly, and allowed their minds to be guided seriously by 
what they found. Others did not mean much by such profes- 
sions, did not study much from old sources, and when they 
met with anything from thence that they did not like, promptly 
threw it overboard, as rubbish unworthy of any serious con- 
sideration. It is never to be forgotten that the sixteenth 
century saw the rise of a new system of religious thought, of 
which whatever else may be said, this at least is certainly true, 
that no Christians had ever held it anywhere in the course 
of the first thousand years of Christian history. There is no 
historical trace of it among the Christians to whom the New 
Testament Scriptures were first given. If therefore those 
Scriptures meant such a system, the meaning was so deeply 
esoteric that it was known to no Christian persons for more 
than a thousand years. This new system in religious thought, 
now known as Protestantism, came in from the continent in 
the particular form of Calvinism, and gained an immense 
hold upon English Christians. When Laud arose, with a 
profound conviction that the Christian religion of the first 
Christian centuries must be substantially the religion of 
Jesus Christ, — and I myself hold that idea to be axio- 
matic, — he found nearly the whole body of the Anglican 
clergy careless or Calvinist. Give him his due. He minded 
carelessness, laziness, and lowness of character a good deal 
more than what he esteemed to be error in thought, when 
judging of an individual. But he believed that if Christ's 
own religion were to be saved in England, the Church of 
England must be brought back to the model of primitive 
antiquity in three points. 

(1) First, she must accept the constitution of the Church 
as divine, and as including government by Apostles, under 
whatever name, the existence of a ministerial priesthood, 
and the transmission of gifts of sacerdotal power, as well as 
of authority, by Apostles alone. 

(2) Second, she must hold to the original Christian con- 
ception of the Sacraments, as divinely ordered means of grace. 



Soldier and Servant Series 33 

(3) Third, in pursuance of this last idea, she must order her 
religious services and the furnishing of her churches (the very 
building itself being of a sacramental order), so as to impress, 
rather than conceal or contradict, the sacramental idea. 

These were principles of the Primitive Church. They were 
principles of the Anglican Reformation in its great official 
pronouncements. The Church of England was actually 
drifting fast away from them, when Laud was raised up as 
an instrument, and an effectual instrument, for her salvation. 

I cannot go into details at all, nor show you what serious 
and shaping consequences to the English-speaking world 
were invo ved in that seemingly trivial struggle to restore 
the Altar to a place and a condition of sacredness in English 
churches. Laud felt keenly the close connection between 
the outward and the inward. 'The Romanists," he writes, 
' have been apt to say, the houses of God could not be suffered 
to lie so nastily, as in some places they have done, were the 
true worship of God observed in them, or did the people 
think that such it were. It is true the inward worship of the 
heart is the great service of God, and no service acceptable 
without it; but the external worship of God in His Church 
is the great witness to the world that our heart stands right in 
that service of God." A quaint illustration of the same idea 
he gave, with sudden wit, in a Visitation of the Church of 
St. Peter, Cornhill, in London. The preacher had discoursed 
of the painfulness of a faithful ministry, instancing the popular 
derivation of Diakonos (from Konis), *'one who runs through 
the dusf on his master's errand. The church, one of the 
distinguished and well-endowed churches of London, was 
seen to be 'Ill-repaired without, and slovenly kept within." 
The bishop delivered a charge to his clergy after service, with 
this extemporaneous addition,— "I am sorry to meet here with 
so true an etmology of diaconus, for here is both dust and 
dirt for a deacon (or a priest either) to work in; yea, it is dust 
of the worst kind, caused from the ruins of this ancient house 
of God, so that it pitieth His servants to see her in the dust."* 

It would be unjust, too, not to mention his zeal for the 
restoration of unity to the Church of Christ, and his largeness, 
rare in that age, in viewing that subject. **I cannot but 

* This story is given by Fuller, Church History of Brifain, VI., 303. 



34 Soldier and Servant Series 

wonder," he says in a sermon at the opening of parliament, 
*'what words St. Paul, were he now alive, would use, to call 
back unity into dismembered Christendom. For my part, 
death were easier to me than to see the face of the Church of 
Christ scratched and torn till it bleeds in every part, as it 
doth this day; and the coat of Christ, which once was spared 
by soldiers because it was seamless, rent everyway, and which 

is the misery of it, by the hand of the priest Good God! 

What preposterous thrift is this in men, to sew up every small 
rent in their own coat, and not care what rents they not only 
suffer, but make, in the coat of Christ? What is it? Is Christ 
only thought fit to wear a torn garment? Or can we think that 
the Spirit of unity, which is one with Christ, will not depart 
to seek warmer clothing? Or, if He be not gone already, why 
is there not unity, which is wherever He is? Or, if He but 
gone from other part of Christendom, in any case, for the 
Passion, and in the Bowels of Jesus Christ, I beg it, make stay 
of Him here in our parts." "The Catholic Church of Christ," 
he says again, **is neither Rome nor a conventicle. Out of that 
there is no salvation, I easily confess it. But out of Rome there 
is, and out of a conventicle too; salvation .is not shut up into 
such a narrow conclave. In this ensuing discourse, therefore, I 
have endeavored to lay open those wider gates of the Catholic 
Church confined to no age, time, or place; nor knowing any 
bounds but that faith which was once' — and but once for all — 
'delivered to the saints.' " Laud was a High-Churchman. 
He was also large. 

The charge of a tendency to Romanism in himself, or to 
make Romanists of others, is to a scholar almost too absurd 
for mention. Protestants are apt to think that a genuine 
Anglicanism must be a position of unstable equilibrium, 
constantly leaning, often tottering, many times falling, Rome- 
ward. Let me point to one good telling fact. I will give as my 
authority an article by Mr. Gladstone on The Evangelical Move- 
ment: its Parentage, Progress, and Issue, in the British Quarterly 
Review for July, 1879. The main secessions from England 
to Rome in the period between 1840 and 1860 were almost 
without exception from among Low-Churchmen, from men 
brought up in unmitigated Protestantism. The noted men, 
Newman, Manning, the Wilberforces, and such, were all of 



William Laud, Archbishop 35 

that training. The sons of the old High Church famiUes,— 
Pusey, the Kebles, the Mozleys, and many more,— stood their 
ground to a man. * And the presence of that sturdy element 
in the Church of England is due to Laud. It marks his life a 
success. It is his triumph. 

'That we have our Prayer Book," says Canon Mozley, "our 
Altar, even our Episcopacy itself, we may, humanly speaking, 

thank Laud That our Articles have not a Genevan sense 

tied to them and are not an intolerable burden to the Church, 

is due to Laud Laud saved the English Church The 

English Church in her Catholic aspect is a memorial to Laud." 

So in Mr. Gladstone's notable Romanes Lecture, delivered 
before Oxford University in October, 1892, having remarked 
that '*0f Laud as a Churchman it ought to have been remem- 
bered, at least in extenuation, that he was the first Primate 
of All England in many generations who proved himself by 
his acts to be a tolerant theologian," Mr. Gladstone emphasized 
the fact that ''After obtaining hold of the helm, he gave to 
the Anglican polity and worship what was in the main the 
impress of his own mind: that though he sank to the ground 
in the conflict of the times, which he had much helped to 
exasperate," yet ''his scheme of Church poHty, for his it 
largely was, grew up afresh out of his tomb, and took effect 
in law at the Restoration." 

Laud as a Churchman has lasted. He lives to-day. His 
opponents have mostly disappeared from off the earth. They 
have left consequences, but no representatives. Laud has both. 

* Mr. Gladstone speaks of a pamphlet enumerating three thousand 
seceders. Some of these, he says, "were persons brought for the first time 
under strong religious influences. Some cases may have been due to personal 
idiosyncrasies; some to a strong reaction from pure unbelief; some came from 
Presbyterianism; the merest handful from Nonconformity, or on the other 
side, from the old-fashioned Anglican precinct, represented by men like 
Archbishop Howley, Bishop Blomfield, or Dr. Hook. Very many, and es- 
pecially among women, made the change through what may be called pious 
appetite, without extended knowledge or careful inquiry. But there was a 
large and still, more, an important class, not included within any of these 
descriptions; principally clerical, but not without a lay fraction, niade up of 
men competent in every way by talent, attainment, position, character, to 

exercise a judgment They draw scores, aye, hundreds of others in their 

train; and of all these leaders it must be said that, as they proceeded from 
Oxford (so to speak) to Rome, so they had already marched from Clapham 
to Oxford." 

I may add my testimony that of the men and women of whom I have 
had personal knowledge, who have gone from our Communion to the Roman, 
every one was brought up in non-Episcopalian Protestantism, or in the atmos- 
phere of the Low Church Party. 



